🎨 Making Long Coding Sessions More Pleasant - The Story Behind Harmonia Theme

A good theme isn’t just a color palette - it’s a tool to protect your focus, reduce fatigue, and make your editor feel like home.

🧪 Why build a theme?

I’ve always enjoyed fine-tuning my development environment - from terminal fonts to keyboard shortcuts. But I could never quite settle on a theme that felt truly coherent, balanced, and comfortable for long hours of work.

So I decided to try something: build my own Visual Studio Code theme.

Not as a designer, but as a developer - out of curiosity, to learn, and to see how much impact a well-crafted theme could really have.

🌙 Dark, soft, and focused - that’s Harmonia

From the start, Harmonia had a clear goal: to be a dark, soft, visually consistent theme, especially tailored for web developers.

I focused on the languages and file types I use the most: PHP, JavaScript (and friends like TypeScript and JSX), JSON, config files, Docker, Apache, Nginx, and log files.

The idea was to highlight what matters without visual noise. A theme that feels calm and lets your code breathe.

🖌️ The color decisions

Instead of choosing flashy or high-contrast colors, I took a more subtle approach: • Soft yet deep background: dark enough to reduce eye strain, but not harsh black. • Readable, rich foreground: avoiding pure white or washed-out grays. • Syntax colors with character - not chaos: strong enough to be useful, but not overwhelming.

Each color was tested and adjusted to feel consistent across different languages and syntaxes, without breaking the harmony of the overall palette.

👁️ Why colors matter

We spend countless hours looking at our editors. A bad theme can be a constant source of visual fatigue, even if you don’t realize it.

A well-balanced color scheme can help you: • stay focused longer • avoid headaches or eye strain • actually enjoy the experience of coding a bit more

In my opinion, a theme is part of developer ergonomics. Just like a good chair or a calibrated monitor. You don’t notice the value - until you use one that’s actually well made.

🧠 What I learned along the way

Creating a theme is more technical than it might seem. I learned: • how VS Code token scopes work • how to group styles across languages and file types • how to test palettes while keeping consistency • how to package and publish to the VS Code Marketplace • how to generate proper previews for other users to see what you see

It wasn’t hard - but it was detail-heavy.

And that made it fun.

⚠️ About updates

I work full-time, so updates may not come frequently - but I’ll continue improving Harmonia little by little, especially around the languages and tools I use most in web development.

That includes PHP, JS/TS, JSON, configs, Dockerfiles, and log files.

If time allows, I’d love to expand support for other languages and improve the theme’s scope coverage even more.

📦 Where to find it

Harmonia Theme is available now on the Visual Studio Code Marketplace.

🔗 Direct link to the extension

📸 Screenshots and changelog on GitHub

🙌 Thanks for reading

This was a small side project - but one that brought me a lot of satisfaction.

If it helps even one more developer feel a bit more comfortable during a long coding session, it was totally worth it.

And if you try it - I’d love to hear what you think.